As established in my brainstorming concepts, I’d like the hands to be the player controller (as shown in the image below).
I’d decided to do a first draft in creating the hands to familiarise myself with this process. As I’m not used to modelling hands, I was a bit worried, but I decided to just try. I used this 3D modelling process as a guide (not a tutorial) to help me create the fingers.
- I started by creating the middle finger, as it is always the longest finger on the hand, and I can duplicate it later. I used an elongated cube, as you can see from the first image, extruded it and used the knife tool to create a rough circle within the finger, which then could be used to create the nail.
2. You can see the finished finger above. I then duplicated this 3 times and added a rotated thumb part.
3. I reset the location and rotations of the fingers so they would stand up straight. I then added another cube, added loop cuts and divided it into 3 parts and placed the fingers in their correct anatomical places.
4. This was when I joined all the objects together and smoothed it out by correcting some of the topology by removing and adding vertices. However, it looks a bit “off” due to my incorrect placement of the thumb.
How do I improve on what I’ve done so far?
As this is just a test, I plan to remake the hand, but I wanted to experiment with what I already knew.
- Fix the Purlicue (the skin between the thumb and forefinger) by using proportional editing to move that area up
- Add knuckles, make the hand curved slightly
- Make the hand slightly smaller, as I’m using a child’s hand for reference; this hand feels a bit big.
With my self-critique, I started to redo the hand, focusing on building the structure from the knuckles, but I am thinking of doing a second attempt using more resources and an in-depth tutorial.
Resources I’m looking at for my second attempt
- A diagram of the anatomy of the hand by the American Society for Surgery of the Hand. I’ve been looking at this page specifically to get an idea of how the hand looks and moves.
Body Anatomy: Upper Extremity Joints | The Hand Society
- A simplified hand diagram from infografolio
- A streamlined tutorial about creating hands with good topology
